Stephen Hunt - The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

Then he was gone, his cries echoing fainter and fainter in the corridor outside, the two great doors cutting off his howls of anger with a heavy thump. The retainers busied themselves, cleaning up the spilled food and blood that had fallen across the observation glass. One of the staff lifted up the upset tureen. ‘Tree … what tree was he talking about?’

Quest stood up from the table, wiping the soup off his shirt, and laid a reassuring hand on the retainer’s shoulder. ‘I doubt if we will ever know — or understand if we did.’

He lifted up the mask of Furnace-breath Nick, examining it from different angles, as if the answer lay in the sigils painted on its surface. Shaking his head he put the devil’s mask down and left the chamber.

‘And he had the audacity to think me insane.’

Amelia was starting to believe the deranged ramblings of that old hag in Cassarabia and the prognostications of Rapalaw Junction’s witch doctor. If her life had a purpose, a point, a fixed resolution on the Circle, then investigating the strange pocket world they had been transported to from under the lake in the ruins of Camlantis was it. She reined herself in. When you started believing your own press in the penny dreadfuls, that was when you got sloppy … and sloppy in her trade meant a trapdoor falling onto a chute lined with steel stakes.

Amelia glanced across at Bull Kammerlan. ‘The ruler of the Daggish seemed convinced its crown is down here. Let’s see if we can find it.’

Bull glanced around. ‘Which way?’

Under the land’s artificial sun, her sense of direction wasn’t as good as it normally was — but a part of her knew where they should be heading all the same. This was quite disconcerting. Did birds feel the same way when they quit a Jackelian winter for warmer climes, or did they just accept the knowledge of direction and the urge to travel, like they accepted the impulse to feed on an empty belly? At the edge of the forest the throbbing, waxy skin of the living machines gave way to a slope covered with structures that seemed to glisten on the hillside — an architecture that had last been seen on the surface of the world many thousands of years ago.

‘There’s a city,’ said Bull, ‘an entire city down here.’

Amelia sighed. ‘Not quite.’

From their elevation she could see the entrance to other unexplored chambers beyond the floating, simulated sun. So, what lay through those? The two of them could explore for weeks down here, although with only the sugary rain for nourishment, Amelia suspected that her body would give out on her before her thirst for exploration did.

They walked closer to the city facing them, its architecture shimmering as their perspective changed; but what an architecture — as much art, as construction — raised from tiny germs of life and grown in accordance with long-lost principles of harmony, a perfect balance of space and light. Not meant to overwhelm like the palladian extravagance of the richer quarters of Middlesteel, nor thrown together out of hard necessity like the capital’s poverty-stricken slums. This organic city possessed sweeps and curves that made the habitation of it as natural as living in a forest; brief glimpses of such places in a crystal-book could never equal the actual experience of walking through its boulevards.

Bull Kammerlan ran his hand through the wall of one of the fluted towers, the sides flickering as his fingers passed through the material. ‘A ghost town! But I can feel the surface.’

Amelia placed her own hand on a wall, the tower shivering as her fingers passed completely through it, horizontal transparency lines flickering while she walked along. She might have been running her hands through a waterfall, but she could feel the surface too: a resin — oaken wood that had been blended with the properties of a synthetic metal when it grew. Natural, but as hard as a steamman knight’s hull. ‘These ghosts remember. The projection contains the memory of what once was.’

‘Projection?’ Bull peered around them. ‘This is a magic lantern show?’

‘No,’ said Amelia wistfully. ‘The magic disappeared a long time ago. This is what is left of a dream. Unfortunately, I rather think the dream is mine.’

‘There’re no people in this projection,’ said Bull. ‘What’s the point of a city with no people?’

‘I noticed that too.’

Amelia did not say that the ghosts of this place could not bear to remember the missing, a whole civilization, as shining a zenith as the race of man had ever climbed — a million or more people who had sacrificed themselves so their legacy would not be corrupted.

She led them through the not-so-solid memories of what had once been, compensating for the tricks of perspective as the city rebuilt itself around them, taking them along boulevards that once towered majestically above the surface of Lake Ataa Naa Nyongmo; past river-sized aqueducts snaking under monorails; through gardens where abstract sculptures cycled from one artist’s creation to another’s — a cubist body lifting up a dancer in the air, before morphing into a knot of spheres that might have been a bird, then turning into an explosion of fused pyramids.

The ghosts were playing tricks on her. They didn’t want to harm her, that much was clear, but they were trying to conceal what was at the heart of this apparition. The core that called out to her. She had a terrible suspicion of what she would find, and the decision she would have to make there. This chamber wasn’t big enough to hold a thousandth of the glory that had been Camlantis. It was a maze resetting itself about them, trying to mask its true nature.

‘This won’t do,’ said Amelia. She felt like crying. Everything she had seen suggested in every broken fragment of the past she had risked her neck for, it was all true. The Camlanteans’ lives had been lived as art. Their skies filled not with the deadly pea-soupers of steam engines, but with delicate wisp-lines of mists from towers that converted rainwater into inestimable reserves of energy, or streets that drank their power from the endless light of the sun. All this lost, until now.

She switched direction, trusting her inner compass over the priceless glimpses she was being afforded into the long-lost culture. The ghosts of Camlantis cycled through more of their streets and scenes, faster, trying to entice them away from the small passages and back paths she was committing them to now. Amelia ignored the ghosts when they showed her an arena with controlled microclimates, the absent weather artists’ creations playing to an empty stadium, or a vast square racked with rainbow-coloured rotor-like umbrellas that could be used to lift curious travellers into the air and transport them to any part of the city with a simple command. Whatever the wonders on display, she was no longer for turning.

As if sensing her determination on this matter, the apparitions gave up and finally opened their architecture out onto another square, a tower in its centre enclosed by slow-moving spirals of radiance.

‘At last,’ said Amelia, ‘something real.’

She approached the tower and it began to descend into the ground. Ribbons of light twisted back up towards the reducing zenith of the tower, the entire city around them sinking towards the ground as if Camlantis was being submerged by a tide. With the last twist of light sucked into the tip of the tower, the fading illumination revealed a crown similar to the circlet worn by the Daggish emperor. This one had a single addition that immediately caught their attention — a crimson jewel the size of an egg sparking in the centre of the headpiece. The city about them had vanished. Only the tower remained, the column reset at the height of their shoulders.